- The trickster seeds the mind with paralyzing terror
Bearing false witness to the bitter truth at hand.Quatrain 45, Century 8
Cade joins a support group for alien abductees. But he's not the only one undercover...
Tropes:
- Alien Abduction: Subverted: members of the Alien Abduction Support Group are revealed to be hypnotized by aliens to recall false memories as part of an experiment.
- All Just a Dream: The Gua agent hypnotises Cade into believing that everything that happened to him over the past few months was nothing but a dream, including his wife's murder.Vanessa: You think I hypnotized everyone? What if you're wrong? [pulls out a watch] What if this was All Just a Dream? (starts swinging the watch) What if the last three months of your life... were nothing but a dream?
- Crying Wolf: The Gua plan for this episode is to set up Dr. Rita Hagen, the group leader, as an expert on aliens before revealing that all the "testimony" she's written about is fake. The aim is to make anyone claiming aliens are real look delusional so it's harder for people like Cade to warn people about the invasion.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: Nicole, the girl in the couple from the Cold Open, was raped in her "abduction" and is understandably traumatised. Vanessa, another girl in the support group, claims to have highly sexual abductions too, but she likes them and tells Nicole her attitude is wrong and that, effectively, she should be flattered. Shockingly, Vanessa is the alien.
- Driven to Suicide: Nicole tries to commit suicide at one point towards the end. Fortunately, Cade has figured out how to help her.
- Holy Backlight: At one point, Nicole's Flashback Nightmare is triggered when she sees Cade with a light behind him. That, plus a few more clues, leads Cade to realise her flashbacks are triggered by angelic imagery. He uses this to help her confront her trauma, and realise it wasn't real.
- I Never Said It Was Poison: While talking to Vanessa, she mentions the triggers for different people; she mentions one trigger that she shouldn't have known about, and it all comes together.
